community

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I am writing today to tender my resignation. I cannot identify as a man in any binary sense anymore. After several years of observation, research, and thought, the conclusion I’ve arrived at is being a man is defined only by what it is not. Outside of the context of patriarchy, it means nothing. Many experiences I’ve had since I began identifying as a trans man are invaluable to me. I’ve learned far, far more about gender, sexism, myself… too many things to name… than I ever would have had I not transitioned. I do not regret transitioning in the slightest. I will continue my regular shots of testosterone because it makes me feel better, mentally and physically.

I have found very little that I feel good about that comes with identifying as a man. Because of how gendering generally works, I am very aware of the fact I will most often be gendered as a man. But I am done letting this system we all agree is bullshit determine how I identify and keep me from being insistent about it. I will continue to acknowledge the ways I receive conditional male privilege, but I am done letting others make me feel like I cannot be who I am because of it. I will not disavow my experiences from before I started testosterone. I will not limit the ways I express and present because it makes people, yes even queer people, uncomfortable. “Think outside the gender binary” isn’t a fucking slogan. It’s a plea, a warning that our queer communities cannot continue within this framework. “Well, MOST people are either women or men” is NOT a good reason. “Non-binary people make things complicated” is also NOT a good reason!

Shit’s already complicated!

It angers me how much our communities police people’s genders, both on- and off-line. We all say and do misogynistic and sexist things. ALL OF US. We’re all products of this culture and we’re all human beings who have blind spots and fuck up sometimes. Since the gender binary ain’t going anywhere anytime soon, I think women’s spaces are necessary, but I’m also very, very uncomfortable with the amount of policing that is done in the name of preserving them. If you’re upset because there are people in a women’s space that you feel shouldn’t be there, first you need to check your assumptions before you do ANYTHING else. Then talk to them. And maybe, hey, you’re right, this really isn’t the best space for them. But they’re there because there’s no alternative space where they feel safe. That’s a fucking problem for your whole damn queer community. It won’t be easy to solve. AND THE ANSWER IS NOT TELLING THEM TO GO MAKE THEIR OWN SPACE AS YOU KICK THEM OUT. If you comfortably identify and are gendered as a woman and they identify as non-binary, then you are the one with more privilege in that particular situation. If you identify as and are comfortably gendered as a woman or a man, then you have more privilege in queer spaces than those who do/are not.

I am trans, non-binary, and gender-fluid. My gender is far more than my clothes or my hair or my mannerisms on any particular day. My pronouns are they/them/their. I refuse to continue identifying as a trans man just because it makes things easy and comfortable for other people. Fuck your comfort. Queer isn’t suppose to be easy.

Alright, People of the Internet, I gotta get something off my chest. If you’re going to write about queer community, especially if you’re trying to call out bullshit happening within it, I implore you to CHECK YOUR SELECTION BIAS. There isn’t one vast, nation-wide Queer Community or Culture. It does not exist. There are a plethora of queer communities and cultures, many of them geographically-based.

So when you say something like trans men have an hegemony over trans women or that they carry more cachet in the community than any other group, I’m going to need to stop you right there and ask, “Which queer community?” or “Where do you happen to live?” I’m not doubting what you say, nor trying to derail the conversation. This shit is important to talk about. But we (I’m including myself in this because I still do it too) need to remember that the issues the queer communities here in Austin need to deal with are not the same as the ones in, say, San Francisco or Chicago, There are inevitably issues many communities are struggling with, generally issues that are reflections of bullshit from the dominant cultures. Talking about how that shit plays out in our various communities and what we can do to make it better is important.

But it seems like some people base their assertions about QUEER COMMUNITY on the relatively small group of queer people they happen to see at events or interact with online most frequently. People saying and doing shitty things is, in fact, shitty. More specifically, it’s shitty that some people seem to only know trans guys who aren’t really stand-up people. But please stop generalizing about all trans men from that small-ish number of people. Trans people – non-binary, genderqueer, women, men – all of us deal with bullshit, even if it’s not the same bullshit in the same ways.

Basically this: by all means, call out people in your community that need to be called out, but please check your selection bias before invoking The Queer Community.

I have a confession: I don’t like the standard LGBT acronym. More than a little. The whole paradigm we use to talk about sexuality, gender, physical sex, attraction, etc. frustrates me endlessly and is in dire need of revision; I’ll come back to that later. That culture-wide paradigm shift ain’t gonna happen over-night, so we gotta interact with most people within this framework. And in this framework, “one of these things is not like the others…”

Another confession: I can’t wait for LGBT identity politics to die. Mainly, I have the highest hope that we, as a culture, will change enough so that we just don’t need it anymore. In a secondary role is weariness for the bullshit that crops up when LGBT identity politics loses sight of actual people. I am aware some do not like using queer to describe people who fit somewhere in LGBTQAI- (which is a better acronym than LGBT at least). In general, I support groups reclaiming the slurs used against them, but I also can understand the notion that some words should just be ushered out of common use. In any case, my personal feelings don’t (and shouldn’t) count on this subject much of the time, but in the case of queer, I believe it relays a meaning that The Acronym doesn’t. To me, being queer is a commitment. It’s making the choice to have concern for and to participate in developing and improving our communities, working for our rights, speaking out when others can’t, engaging the culture-at-large to push back against hate, surviving and thriving in spite of our society’s efforts to eliminate us. It’s standing up for all of us, even those of us you will never know or relate to, or don’t like something about. It’s doing whatever is within your means to make it clear we are not going away, whether that’s doing what you need to do to make sure you wake up tomorrow or donating a fuck-ton of money to a trans legal aid fund. Basically, not every LGBTQAI- person is queer by default.

I think queerness is like gender – they’re things you do, not things you intrinsically are.

One of the main aspects of our current LGBT sex-and-gender paradigm that pisses me off is the Born This Way myth. I was not somehow destined to be the exact person I am at this moment, and neither were you. We’re the products of incalculable interactions between our genetic potential, our bodies, our minds, our environments, and our choices. This myth sets us up to have fights about who’s “trans enough” to “be allowed” to access hormones, surgeries, and therapies. Or who’s “trans enough” to deserve protection. I’ve heard and seen variations and implications of “If you don’t make every effort to conform to the dominant expectations of one of these two genders, whatever bad shit happens to you is really your own fault” over and over again, from cis people but even more forcefully from other trans people. It leaves people who are genderqueer, ungendered, other gendered, or fluid in their gender presentation out to fucking dry. It turns “detransitioning” into a betrayal. It completely ignores the many factors that affect why a person may want hormones, but not surgery, or why they might stop taking hormones for a time, or why people who want to medically and/or socially transition delay doing so, and so forth.

Maybe most of all, I despise how this myth takes away agency. Nobody held a goddamn gun to my head and made me start testosterone injections, not even myself. Would I have committed suicide had I not? I’d bet it would have raised the likelihood of it, though I’ve nearly committed suicide twice since starting. Suicide is a choice. I’ve chosen to not kill myself on several occasions. It’s worse than terrible, and I can never fault people who got to that fork in the road and chose the other path. At the time I started taking testosterone, I would have told you it wasn’t a real choice. I was in a lot of pain and I believed that would make the pain less (it did). But just because one of the options is bad does not mean a choice is not being made. Sometimes all of the options are shit and you still have to choose. I chose to start testosterone and I chose to start presenting as a man socially.

In our culture, the word “choice” has connotations of unimportance, flippancy, and selfish desire. Alright then, how about “decision” then? I decided to do those things. Does using the word “decision” make what I did more legitimate and acceptable? Probably; words shape our realities. In this case, you know and I know both words refer to the same action.

Which brings us to why this myth exists. Legitimacy. Acceptability. Natalie Reed puts it better than I could:

Gender identity has always been deeply connected to the “Born This Way” concepts of gender and sexual orientation. The qualifiers of “deep-seated”, “intrinstic” and, often, “immutable” added onto “sense of self” typically seem far more connected to saying “We can’t help it! This is fundamentally who we are! It’s totally completely inherent! Seriously! We were born this way!” *as a response* to social pressures suggesting that being trans or being queer is only permissible or understandable if it can’t be helped, or that cissexism and heterosexism only count as bigotry and unethical if they’re targeting an inherent, immutable, non-fluid aspect of someone’s being that was present from birth and they have no control over. Which is, to be frank, not only a totally ridiculous attitude to have about bigotry and why it’s not okay, but also a mentality that lends strength to the idea that trans and queer identities, bodies and behaviours are less preferable than cis and straight ones (and helps validate the underlying misogyny that fuels a great deal of cissexism). “GOD NO, of course no one would CHOOSE to be queer, or transsexual, or a woman. That would be repulsive and insane! But we simply can’t help having this tragic, deplorable condition.”

Hey, real quick, you know what’s definitely a choice, yet our culture flips its collective shit over when people have the gall to express dislike or fear of? Being a Christian. #makesuthink

She goes on to say:

What if I did choose to be a trans woman? What if I refused to play along with social demands that I justify this, and the only explanations I offered was that this makes me feel happier, more secure and confident, more comfortable with how I dress and present myself and more comfortable in my body, and that it makes sex more pleasurable and fun for me? Is that not reason enough? And who the fuck are cis people to say it isn’t, and that I need to provide a better explanation?

I joke that someday somebody’s going to find me dead in an apartment with thirty cats and GENDER IS A SOCIO-CULTURAL CONSTRUCT scrawled all over every wall. Gender essentialism is pervasive in our LGBT subculture and our culture at large. I feel like there’s no escape from it sometimes. “It’s just how men/women are,” but there is not one goddamn thing that’s written into our DNA about it. And every time there’s some news story covering some study that “proves” this shit…

(image description: a gif of various TV and movie characters with their hand over their face in exasperation)

Studying gender is not pure Ivory Tower bullshit, and I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to convince people that.

A “socio-cultural construct” is basically something people came up with that serves a function that keeps their society running smoothly and influences most (if not all) social interactions from the personal one-on-one conversations to large addresses being delivered to thousands. Stripped down to its core, gender was created as a way to differentiate people based on their primary sexual organs to facilitate reproduction. Arbitrary choices and practical considerations of clothing, appearance, and behavior were likely some of the first methods of differentiation. But as sexuality became more complicated, so did gender. Much like how societies sort out gendered appearances and behaviors in the two static categories of “woman” and “man,” generally chosen for a person at birth based on their genitals, Western European and American societies’s modern delineation of “homosexual” and “heterosexual” changed sexual preferences/behaviors into static personal identities. Our (dominant, straight) culture is obsessed with the idea of “gaydar” – we really want to believe there are ways to tell if someone is gay just by looking at them or talking to them for a bit. Otherwise, how would we know?? They could just go around like everyone else! Straight people desperately fear being “deceived” by gay people, much like cis people fear being “deceived” by trans people.

Another confession: We really do complicate this whole thing. Without trans people, it’s all nice and neat – a woman’s vagina and a man’s penis, two men’s penises, two women’s vaginas. Homosexual people like having sex with people with of the same gender, i.e. people with the same primary sexual organs. It’s the same, but different! Our culture has become more accepting of this version of homosexuality, which includes the Born This Way myth. It’s no surprise so many LGB people act like trans people (particularly trans people who are gender non-conforming or variant) are going to ruin their party and make all the straight folks mad.

Another confession: I will never, ever go back to any university’s Women’s and Gender Studies program. Aside from problems with the ways universities are structured and funded that affect every department, Women’s and Gender Studies programs privilege a very short list of perspectives. I hope this anecdote gets my point across: A few years ago, I took a course that was essentially LGBT literature. There were about 15 students in the class, and I was the only trans (or gender variant) person. I had a woman (probably 19-20, straight to college after high school, middle class, white, identified as a lesbian) try to argue with me that my relationship with my partner (a cis man) was not gay or homosexual. I was working real hard to keep it civil, because classroom discourse. Thankfully, the professor was great. He identified as a gay man, and jumped in noting that he had dated a FTM trans person. He agreed with my point, which was that we constantly conflate gender and sex when discussing sexual identity. Two people who are gendered as men by others in public being physically affectionate with one another will be seen as being in a homosexual or gay relationship, regardless of which primary sexual organs they have or which sex acts they perform with each other. I wish I could say that was the only argument I had like that, but it wasn’t.

Which brings me back to our cultural paradigm on sexuality, gender, physical sex, attraction, etc. I hope I’ve shown how the dominant LGBT identity politics perspective fits right into it, and does so by leaving the T out a great deal. At best, this paradigm is frequently useless for communicating a lot of the relevant information to others about our needs and wants, about what we like and how we see ourselves and how we want others to treat us. At worst, it maintains and perpetuates a fuck-ton of oppression (heteronormative, sexist, cissexist, transmisogynistic, misogynistic), and on a personal level, makes it practically impossible for many people to negotiate their sexuality in basic ways so that it’s fulfilling for them.

[This post started with me thinking about Natalie Reed’s Trans 101. I will be talking about posts by her quite a bit.]

I left trans town some time ago, by choice. When I decided to come back recently, I didn’t find the town I knew. I’ve found some new, off-the-beaten-path places that are great – refreshingly different, working with people from other towns on projects, not kicking out those that don’t “mesh well,” wanting to help the whole community. Some just moved to a new address or changed the name of their company.

But what’s struck me the most is it seems like a lot of the town has been renovated – new paint, new decor, remodeling. People from all over have actually started paying attention to our small-but-growing town, so it’s natural to want to make a good impression. We want to be accessible, familiar. Safe. Yes, we’re doing very well, thank you for noticing our town. We smile. We give the same answers to the same questions. We ignore the jokes and the little snide remarks. We don’t show anger, but make polite (but firm!) statements reminding visitors that people deserve to have their humanity respected. And as you can see, we’re people. Just like you.

Every one of us knows why. Don’t fuck it up for everyone. More of us are getting what we need than ever. Don’t do anything to make them take it all away.

When someone is getting too much attention for saying the wrong things, enough of us come down on them in fearful rage to remind them. Don’t let them hear you say that. It’s okay when it’s just us, but they won’t understand. It will make them afraid and they will punish all of us for it.

At this point, it’d be easy for a lot of you from out-of-town to say, “You should stand up for yourselves! Fight! Don’t just take it! How is anything going to change if you don’t do something?” (Protip: Don’t be that person.)

The thing is these fears are well-founded. Our town has a high rate of unemployment and poverty. Violence against us happens daily – too many become the victims of murder, rape, assault. Too many of us cannot get the medical care we need. Too many cannot even visit their home towns. Laws are made explicitly to hurt us and we are intentionally left out of laws that will protect others. This doesn’t even begin to cover the uncountable micro-aggressions we deal with on a day-to-day basis – the slurs, the erasure, the jokes – that are cogs that keep this system going.

This current state of affairs is understandable. The sense of precariousness is palpable. A few of the significant points of progress made in the last several years have happened in government offices through relatively small changes, revisions, and clarifications. They weren’t big news stories picked up by the major networks. It almost felt purposefully clandestine. We’ve been watching what can happen when the majority is allowed to vote on the rights of a minority: getting marriage equality initiatives passed in “liberal” states has been an uphill battle, forget about everywhere else. Flying under radar, intentional or not, may have been the best way for us to make progress on issues related to the government and legal system.

My major problem with all this is that only trans people otherwise largely privileged by our society are setting the narrative. Most of this is their fear. They have something to lose. They get to access the gatekeepers, and hell, some of them have become gatekeepers. They are writing the script – in university classes, with published works, working with LGB organizations. We all get a copy sooner or later: The Transgender Tragedy. We are all influenced by what society says about gender. By keeping it firmly in the frame society has set up, it mostly avoids forcing cis people to consider their own ideas about gender, how those ideas affect their lives and identities, because doing so upsets and scares them. The Transgender Tragedy remains the only canonical narrative because it doesn’t actually pose a threat to theirs.

I left because I was tired of being The Trans Person all the time, reciting my lines. Things were lurking in the back of my mind about the Trans 101 concepts and narratives I had been telling anyone who would listen. I couldn’t figure out what was nudging at me. And frankly, my life was not stable. I had been taking testosterone long enough that I was gendered as a guy 100% of the time, and I really needed to figure out how to navigate this new world that I suddenly found myself in. I needed to shut the fuck up and listen to people. I had to step off the stage.

So I just… lived my life. I could never ignore gender, though. The way it colors every single interaction. Eventually, things settled down, and I found myself missing being part of discussions of gender and trans issues and queerness. Concepts and ideas had slowly evolved, but I didn’t have the language to talk about them. Then one day, I got in my car and started driving for no reason and ended up back in the old neighborhood – reading, catching up. I’ve been doing that for about a month. Now I need to talk/write my way through all this.

I did a whole mess of generalizing and oversimplification in this post, which I dislike doing. I want to get going, see where things lead. Think of this as me waving my hand toward a direction, in a vague kind of way. I’m going that way. Mostly forward, I hope.